Apparently satisfied with their stated reason for visiting the island, he climbed back aboard the bus and waited while his handful of passengers settled themselves. Then he put the vehicle in gear and drove off toward town. Kaktovik had two small hotels and a bed-and-breakfast inn. At this time of the year, any of them would be grateful to have paying guests, even at a reduced government rate.

Several hours later, wearing a white camouflage smock over his cold weather gear, Captain Nick Flynn crouched behind a row of rusting, ice-covered oil drums on the outskirts of Kaktovik. This stretch of waste ground behind the town was covered with tarpaulin-sheathed whale boats, old cars up on blocks, abandoned shipping containers, and other junk. Clouds covered the night sky, and, except for a few lights shining among the town’s ramshackle houses and buildings, it was pitch-dark. The temperature was well below zero. Despite his heavy clothing, his bones ached with cold, and he had to lock his jaws shut to keep his teeth from chattering. Every minute spent motionless here in the dark robbed him of precious body heat, but even the slightest movement could be fatal to his plans.

“Comanche Six, this is Comanche One,” Senior Airman Mark Mitchell’s voice said quietly through his radio earpiece. There was an undercurrent of excitement in the young radioman’s voice. “I think the balloon is going up, sir. We just got a flash message from the RAOC. They report that our radar here is being jammed.”

“Copy that,” Flynn replied, suddenly feeling warmer. The Regional Air Operations Center was located hundreds of miles south at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. It was an underground command and communications center crammed full of sophisticated computers and displays. Every piece of data gathered by the North Warning System air defense radars lining Alaska’s thousands of miles of frontier was fed straight back to the RAOC, where trained specialists sorted the wheat from the chaff—deciding which unidentified air contacts were genuine and which were nothing more than flocks of migratory birds or wind-driven ice crystals. So the center’s report that signals from Barter Island’s long-range radar were being turned into electronic hash was a sure sign of imminent trouble. “All Comanches, this is Six,” he said into his mike. “Stand by. Don your owl eyes and scan your sectors.”

Disciplined acknowledgments from the five two-man teams he’d deployed earlier that evening flooded smoothly over the radio. He felt a moment’s pride. The soldiers and airmen of his small security team still had some rough edges that needed sanding, but the intensive physical and tactical training he and Andy Takirak had put them through was paying off now. And right when it mattered most.

Flynn opened an insulated pack, pulled out a pair of night vision goggles, and put them on. In the Arctic, extreme cold depleted batteries with frightening speed, which was why it was essential to keep any electronic equipment as warm as possible until it was really needed. He switched the goggles on. Instantly, the world around him brightened into a monochrome vista that was almost as clear as natural daylight. Then he settled back to keep watch over his own chosen sector.